a solid film. Very well acted

| Apr 7, 2025

My favorite scene in the film is an emotionally flattened Miles chowing down on a burger and fries while he pours a vintage bottle of wine into a Styrofoam cup while wearing a tux in a fast food shop. Giamatti made you feel all of it.

| Dec 29, 2024

Giamatti, although overlooked by the Academy, serves as the emotional anchor of the film, holding its narrative together with his compelling performance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 22, 2024

Alexander Payne’s road movie about best friends taking a bachelor party on the road through California vineyard country is a modern buddy film with a seventies sensibility.

| Jan 6, 2024

Payne is a compassionate observer here, letting the dialogue scenes breathe, unafraid to throw in some slapstick.

| Original Score: B | Sep 19, 2022

It is a powerfully written story captured onscreen by Alexander Payne with a wondrous humanity and sensitivity.

| Original Score: 4.0/4.0 | Sep 23, 2020

This is a film about human beings who can be flawed and prickly but if you go a little deeper, you will see beauty. This is a wonderfully written script, with a great performance by Paul Giamatti.

| May 18, 2020

Funny, touching, and features perhaps the best ensemble work of any film in recent memory. And like fine wine, the movie ages well upon reflection.

| Nov 16, 2019

A film that not only demands to be sampled but to be gulped down and savored like the vintage draft that it is.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 5, 2019

Unfolding at a relaxed tempo, and unobtrusively edited, Sideways is a welcome throwback to 1970s Bob Rafelson and Jerry Schatzberg.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 23, 2019

Where Payne's fondness for template narratives has started to become a problem, Sideways - as the title evinces - has much a more complex take on the possibility of catharsis

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 12, 2018

A beautiful little chamber dramedy about four sharply-drawn characters played with a very lovely mixture of nuance and showmanship.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 27, 2017

Payne's most enjoyable movie since Election

| Original Score: B | May 24, 2013

Full Review | Apr 3, 2012

Payne does know how to capture two kinds of male menopause. But I can't say he ever surprised me.

| Feb 13, 2012

Excellent but explicit movie is not for kids.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2010

"Sideways" is about wine aged to perfection sipped by men who've aged to mediocrity - softer, hornier versions of Walter and The Dude. But Miles's brutal honesty is its soul. He's annoyingly, depressingly out there, but never fraudulent.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 1, 2010

Giamatti handily raises what could've been a pedestrian road trip romance into the stratosphere of a world-class character study

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 3, 2010

A very memorable slice of life.

| Apr 29, 2009

This wonderfully satisfying study in human nature is funny and sad and profoundly entertaining from start to finish.

| Oct 18, 2008